Do NOT buy HP products

[VK3DRB]

I believe from the day HP sold their quality products to Agilent when an incompetent woman named Carly Fiorina took over, the company became lost all integrity and respect. Every HP product I have bought and used since has been problematic. Bad drivers, bad software, bad hardware quality, bad hardware design and bad support.

I first felt their wrath of HP incompetency when I bought a HP IPAQ phone. It never worked properly from day one (get an incoming phone call and it randomly reboots during the call). Sent it many times under warranty and the f-wits were clueless how to fix it. I ended up debugging it myself and found a major design flaw for which I created a workaround. HP's bundled TomTom software could not run properly on such HP's incompatible hardware design.

The last straw for HP's came tonight. I wasted four hours of my life trying to install a HP P2055dn printer on someone's Windows 10 PC via USB. HP's drivers are dreadful. Their driver website says there are 3 drivers, but only 2 are listed.... can't they even get that right? Their driver software hangs. I finally got the printer driver to be detected, but for the life of me, it does not print a test page. Their moronic HP Doctor software does not work in saying everything is OK when it isn't. There is nothing wrong with the printer hardware other than the logo "HP". I could not be bothered spending a moment longer on this piece of HP crap. In the rubbish it goes - after I put a hammer though it.

Brother is far FAR better in their quality of design and software. Installation is breeze, unlike HP. As for laptops, HP laptops are crap as well. I only use Brother printers and have never been disappointed.

Sadly, this HP was once a good company. From the day Carly Fiorina took over, it has been downhill. If Mr Hewlett and Mr Packard were alive, they would be ashamed of what became of the once great company they founded. One thing that was good out of tonight's experience was an unfriendly reminder... NEVER, NEVER buy HP.

[PartialDischarge]

If you think about it, Keysight should remain HP, and the crap division of computers, IT and other stuff should have been renamed.

[penfold]

Did you update the firmware on the 2055DN? I used to have all those problems with mine until I updated the firmware, since then, it hasn't given any bother and been a good printer ever since.

I'd tend to agree, but the business-grade stuff seems to be a bit polarising of opinions, I had a Z series workstation, which was great, but one day it went wrong. But also worked in an office operating on a fleet of them, where not a single one gave issues. Printers have been good in terms of build quality and lifespan, but not without driver issues and firmware incompatibilities in the meantime.

[khs]

I believe from the day HP sold their quality products to Agilent when an incompetent woman named Carly Fiorina took over..

No. It was not Carly Fiorina.

It was Lew Platt separatet Agilent from HP.

(Charles H. House, THE HP PHENOMENON, around page 416)

[madires]

Since they started to surprise owners of HP printers with firmware updates preventing the use of non-HP ink or toner cartridges I certainly stay away from HP printers.

[NiHaoMike]

When I was in college, I fixed a HP PC for my friend Allie Moore, which was when I got to see just how poorly made the HPs were compared to Dells of about the same age. Then a few years later, I worked at a place that used HP PCs (not cheap ones either, I recall the list price was something like $3000) and the one I was using broke down. When I went to the IT office to get it fixed, there was a pile of broken HPs waiting for warranty repair. I have never seen so many broken PCs in one place before that...

[james_s]

The HP PCs I've dealt with recently really are not great, I do remember a friend had a HP Vectra 486 that was fantastic but that was about 25 years ago. I haven't really had a lot of issues with HP printers though, I have a Laserjet M254dw that has been brilliant. It's on my network, works with Windows, Mac, Linux no problem, prints fantastic quality (by laser printer standards) color photos, razor sharp text, I've printed a few thousand pages since I bought it, without so much as a hiccup. Wasn't even very expensive.

[james_s]

Since they started to surprise owners of HP printers with firmware updates preventing the use of non-HP ink or toner cartridges I certainly stay away from HP printers.

That's annoying. I guess it's a good thing that I've never updated the firmware on my printer. I don't like updates in general, far too often I have been burned by updates that broke things that were working fine, or added annoying "features" I didn't want. I'm old fashioned in that I expect to buy a device and have it in a finished working state out of the box and just keep working until end of life. The ability to update firmware easily has led to an attitude of "just ship it now and fix/finish it later" which I don't like at all.

[rsjsouza]

I was burned in a very distant past with HP laptops, but at the time they were using the defective Nvidia chips (forgot their series, circa 2006) and they did RMA without a problem. Over the years I had four printers from them (coming from a heavy Epson lineage), all multi-functional and only one (Officejet 6500) was of appalling quality (broke very prematurely) and very expensive to run. The printer that replaced the 6500 was the Officejet 8600, which was extremely conservative in ink usage and an overall great machine. Last week, however, its scanner gave up in the middle of a large job and I rushed to replace it with a 9025e. It works well, is fast and had dual sided scanner with ADF, which is what we need, but so far I have no other info. Ah, the install on a computer was a bit of a PITA, but the printer service on the cellphone recognized it immediately.

[gnavigator1007]

Few years ago, I ended up calling their support line trying to track down a driver (on laptop) that was listed on their site, but was missing a download option. Call center person tried to transfer me to a "tech" for some outrageous $$$/minute rate just to diagnose my issue. I've never hung up a phone faster in my life. Not too long later ended up with another hp laptop. Keyboard never worked out of the box. The owner had had so much runaround with support that they just packed it away and forgot it for months. Easy fix, but crazy that hp would further damage their relationship with a customer that already received a defective item. Haven't had much experience dealing with their printers aside from harvesting the guts out of them, but that itself would seem to indicate that the folks leaving them on the curb don't exactly hold them in high regard.   

[Karel]

I would never buy an inkjet printer. But 10 years ago I bought an HP Laserjet P2055 and I have no complains about it.
It's recognized out of the box on Linux. As of today it still works fine.
But I'll never buy one of the HP consumer class products.

[VK3DRB]

Did you update the firmware on the 2055DN? I used to have all those problems with mine until I updated the firmware, since then, it hasn't given any bother and been a good printer ever since.

I'd tend to agree, but the business-grade stuff seems to be a bit polarising of opinions, I had a Z series workstation, which was great, but one day it went wrong. But also worked in an office operating on a fleet of them, where not a single one gave issues. Printers have been good in terms of build quality and lifespan, but not without driver issues and firmware incompatibilities in the meantime.

I took one last stab at it. Upgraded the firmware tot eh lasts release is 2015, but the driver still hangs. Possibly a registry issue. In fact the clowns at HP describes registry fixes on their website. Could not be bothered. In the bin it went. I have used Brother printers for the past 10 years. NEVER had a problem. They perform well. 10/10 for Japanese quality in design and manufacture, in contrast to HP of the USA. My main Brother printer is a MFC-L2730DW wireless network... brilliant little goer. I print instruction manuals for products I make on the side and it just keeps pumping out the reams without a hiccup. Would I buy Brother again? You betcha.

Maybe HP should start making toilet paper because they seem to be a business closely aligned to crap.

[VK3DRB]

I believe from the day HP sold their quality products to Agilent when an incompetent woman named Carly Fiorina took over..

No. It was not Carly Fiorina.

It was Lew Platt separatet Agilent from HP.

(Charles H. House, THE HP PHENOMENON, around page 416)

Carly Fiorina masterminded the merger with Compaq, which was the beginning of the end for HP. Fiorina laid off 30,000 HP employees as a result of the merger with Compaq - it was HER doing. She wasn't there for long before she was booted out by the board - with an outrageous severance pay of $US 42 million. A couple of years earlier, Louis Gerstner at IBM pocketed around $500 million, whilst treating employees as disposable fodder. Greed is not good for anyone except for the pig with his or her snout in the trough.

[madires]

That's annoying. I guess it's a good thing that I've never updated the firmware on my printer. I don't like updates in general, far too often I have been burned by updates that broke things that were working fine, or added annoying "features" I didn't want.

You don't have to worry about old printers, they won't get firmware updates anyway. The effected printers are newer models from the last 4 years or so and they have auto-update enabled by default. The first time HP tried to activate the HP-only feature there was a huge outcry and HP backed down. But they are still trying push that feature.

[Siwastaja]

I thought I had seen everything but when an HP "office" inkjet printer suddenly woke up and printed a colorful advertisement of HP without my consent obviously using the expensive inks in the process, I was actually stunned.

[Howardlong]

There's always the botched purchase of Autonomy, and HP Enterprise.

Around 2010 before the Autonomy takeover, I had some dealings with Autonomy and it was very disappointing from a developer perspective. Unfortunately at that time C-level execs were swooning over Autonomy's over-promised and under-delivered unstructured data management features.

HP Enterprise is the race to the bottom IT services outsourcing outfit, the standard fare of vendor lock-in over a period of several years & mediocre inflexible offering because the C-levels only look at short term $$$, ignoring the need for agility & the need to be able to adapt to changing business requirements.

[edy]

My experience is as a consumer mainly with consumer-level HP printers and computers/laptops. My two cents... The consumer printer market seems to be a spiral down to the bottom with ever-cheaper up-front devices being sold to try to lock you in to ink-subscriptions. Brother seems easier to hack in this respect so I buy whatever printer is cheap that I can then be able to defeat this marketing system. My HP multifunction stopped printing years ago (will never by inkjet again) but I still use the scanning autofeeder (jams a lot especially on flipping pages to do double-sided) and fax, with Linux drivers. If I could just chop it in half and keep the scanner part I would, but I couldn't be bothered and as I'm cleaning up will probably toss the entire thing in garbage... Instead I use my newer Brother scanner/ laser (although it doesn't have the feeder which is nice).

Laptop-wise, my wife's old HP still working. Battery long dead so plug in only... Ubuntu installed on it and works fine. Not a terrible machine, but I wouldn't spend much on a new one... It was relatively cheap at the time. To me HP defines low-end consumer market. Maybe they were better before, but ever since I can remember HP has not instilled confidence so I settle for them if they are inexpensive, and expect the same performance as any other cheap consumer-level electronics (which is not much). Again, I'm looking at this as a consumer printer/laptop user and have not know HP long enough to know "when they used to be good".

[Robert Smith Eco Warrior]

.........Every HP product I have bought and used since has been problematic. Bad drivers, bad software, bad hardware quality, bad hardware design and bad support.

... NEVER, NEVER buy HP.

That has been my experience too 

[Stray Electron]

When I was in college, I fixed a HP PC for my friend Allie Moore, which was when I got to see just how poorly made the HPs were compared to Dells of about the same age. Then a few years later, I worked at a place that used HP PCs (not cheap ones either, I recall the list price was something like $3000) and the one I was using broke down. When I went to the IT office to get it fixed, there was a pile of broken HPs waiting for warranty repair. I have never seen so many broken PCs in one place before that...

  HP Computers are not the same as HP's instruments so don't confer that just because HP makes sorry computers and sorry printers that HP TE is just as bad.

   I have a somewhat recent (8? year old?) HP laptop that I don't have any complaints about (AFTER I clean of the JUNK software that they pre-loaded on it!) BUT HP  have always been a day late and a dollar short when it comes to their PC type computers. HP introduced CPM computers after everyone else had already switched to MS-DOS. And then HP introduced the HP-150 that ran HP-only DOS after everyone else had switched to 100% IBM PC compatible computers. Then HP's Carly Fiorina bought out Compaq computers when the IBM computer clone companies were clearly fighting to survive and Compaq was rapidly failing. Then HP, for years, couldn't build a computer that didn't fail within a few months. IMO HP has consistently  failed to deliver a good PC type computer and/or before that part of the market had already disappeared.

   I love most HP products but their PC computers have always been an extreme disappointment.

 

[james_s]

I love most HP products but their PC computers have always been an extreme disappointment.

As I mentioned earlier, look at the Vectra series from the late 90s, yes they're technologically irrelevant today but they were very good systems that performed well for their time and were reliable. There is a wide span between CP/M machines and the junk consumer PCs that currently get the HP badge slapped on them.

[rstofer]

I don't know about USB connectivity but on my LAN I have that very same P2055dn, an M401DW Laserjet and a MFP277 Color Laserjet.  All work perfectly.  If any firmware updates were required, they must have been hidden because I haven't done anything.

I can hit these printers from Win7, Win10, several incantations of Ubuntu Linux as well as from Raspberry PIs and an NVIDIA Jetson Nano.  I can also hit the P2055dn from an LPC1768 uC using Berkeley Sockets to send plot commands.

I may get upset with HP from time to time but not over their printers.

[AtomicRob]

Wait, I thought HP was an ink company that gave you a free printer clipped to your ink cartridge?

[Bud]

I thought I had seen everything but when an HP "office" inkjet printer suddenly woke up and printed a colorful advertisement of HP without my consent obviously using the expensive inks in the process, I was actually stunned.

This is batshit crazy 

[TimFox]

I love most HP products but their PC computers have always been an extreme disappointment.

As I mentioned earlier, look at the Vectra series from the late 90s, yes they're technologically irrelevant today but they were very good systems that performed well for their time and were reliable. There is a wide span between CP/M machines and the junk consumer PCs that currently get the HP badge slapped on them.

What I remember about the early Vectra DOS computers is that they were built mechanically to typical -hp- standards, which made them more expensive than the competition, which was uneconomical since the field was advancing quickly and they quickly went obsolete.

[james_s]

What I remember about the early Vectra DOS computers is that they were built mechanically to typical -hp- standards, which made them more expensive than the competition, which was uneconomical since the field was advancing quickly and they quickly went obsolete.

They were expensive, but they were very nice if you could afford them. I knew somebody who had a Vectra 486-33 that was the fastest PC I had ever used at the time. It was noticeably quicker than the few other 486-33 systems I had access to. Nice compact system too, and it seems like it was unusually quiet.

[HighVoltage]

I was sooooo much fed up with HP computer products about 15 years ago that I made a deal with myself to never buy another HP product again. And so far I have avoided them like a plaque!

They went from best to worst !

[Stray Electron]

I love most HP products but their PC computers have always been an extreme disappointment.

As I mentioned earlier, look at the Vectra series from the late 90s, yes they're technologically irrelevant today but they were very good systems that performed well for their time and were reliable. There is a wide span between CP/M machines and the junk consumer PCs that currently get the HP badge slapped on them.

What I remember about the early Vectra DOS computers is that they were built mechanically to typical -hp- standards, which made them more expensive than the competition, which was uneconomical since the field was advancing quickly and they quickly went obsolete.

   I still have two working HP Vectras with Hyper Viper cards in them.  :-)  The Vectras were build more like HP instrument line and not their consumer (i.e. Junk) grade computers.

[CatalinaWOW]

I can't totally disagree, but have an HP-7615 printer still plugging away after close to twenty years of use.  The drivers have always had issues, but the printer itself is solid.  Third party scanner software has gotten around the lameness of the HP drivers.  The biggest issue now is that ink is getting hard to find.

[amyk]

Their printers were OK, especially their lasers. Do not use the supplied driver installer though, that installs over 500MB of useless crap, some of which is set to autorun on startup. Either extract it yourself and find the tiny driver to install manually, or use generic HP PCL driver that  comes with the OS.

[HighVoltage]

I still have several old HP Laserjet Printers model 4100 and they are from the olden times. You don't even need a driver installed, because every Windows since XP does have the drivers already.

[Stray Electron]

   I used to have an old HP color Laserjet printer that came from a large US government contractor and I checked the sheet count on it and it had printed over 524,000 pages before I got it. It wasn't working when they gave it me but I opened it up and I found it had four (or five?) brand-new large toner cartridges in it and someone hadn't installed one of them properly. After I corrected that it worked fine.  I used it for a while but I didn't really need a color printer and it was huge so I gave it to someone else. The Laserjet printers where always good printers IMO. I had one of the first low costs models, a 5L IIRC, and it worked fine.

   I don't trust any device that needs to call-home!! I have  Brother HP-5370DW currently and it was constantly connecting back to somewhere and eating into my CPU time. I finally found the responsible piece of software and replaced it with a fake that didn't dial home. I'm not very happy with this printer, it constantly jams paper when trying to feed it into the printer. I only bought this printer because I wanted a Black and White only printer and I wanted something small. I used to have a Canon color printer but I found that it was constantly using up the color inks even though I only printed black and white. But every time that I printed something it would waste color inks while starting up. I literally replaced the color cartridges about twice as often as the black cartridge even though I was only printing in B&W and when any of the color ink got low, it refused to print altogether.

[HighVoltage]

  ... it had printed over 524,000 pages before I got it.

The LaserJet series 4100 and similar models were designed and built for 50,000 pages per month. This goes back to the times of the end of the 90s I think it came on to the market in 97, when I bought my first one.

And still today, we can get parts for these old LaserJet's

If HP would have kept going on this quality level, they most likely would still be the king !
Sadly, many people in my circles complain about modern HP products.
So sad!

 

[cdev]

I have a possible HP question. And maybe not. I think a computer I recently bought might be an HP product, but I dont know.

  ... it had printed over 524,000 pages before I got it.

The LaserJet series 4100 and similar models were designed and built for 50,000 pages per month. This goes back to the times of the end of the 90s I think it came on to the market in 97, when I bought my first one.

And still today, we can get parts for these old LaserJet's

If HP would have kept going on this quality level, they most likely would still be the king !
Sadly, many people in my circles complain about modern HP products.
So sad!

-----

I have a server w/motherboard  (photo of the same model -attached, but its not my unit, Ive had trouble getting a good photo of the whole thing at once. ) that I think may have been OEMed by HP.
I'm trying to find more out about it. It's a firewall appliance sold by Checkpoint. The T-180 (4800 model)

A lot of them have been EOLed and are in the used market. People install firewalls like pfsense and sell them as a firewall. I am trying to figure out how I can run the OS of my choice on them. I have not been able to access the BIOS to boot and install other OS images, as one is supposed to be able to do with the hardware..

If anybody wants one they are on sites like ebay, with the going price is around $100 They have 8 Intel gigabit NICs and an interesting "EZIO" graphics LCD with buttons made I think by Portwell. But without this critical info its a challenge to say the least to use them. Its got a very noisy fan. (probably amendable to software control)

My ultimate goal is to run FreeBSD or one of the firewalls that are based on FreeBSD (pfsense?) and kind of use it as a case for my Samsung GPSDO. with its 1PPS output serving NTP to my LAN segments each on a dedicated NIC. But I shouldn't and don't trust an install done by somebody else. .

I'd also like to run LadyHeather on it. It has a VGA output which I have a pinout for. And Intel G41 SVGA graphics.

It has an Intel Q9400 CPU at 2.6 GHz.

It has a console port but absolutely nothing is coming out of it currently, as far as I can tell. Maybe it is directing its output to the VGA and a console window that is currently not there?

Anyway, I was hoping that somebody knew more about HP computing hardware as I think the board may be a custom HP product. It came with a small HP SSD in it. (28 GB) The Checkpoint part number is CPAP-SG4800-NGTX-HPP-HA-LCM - I'd most like to get more information on the mother board.

It currently has 8GB of memory (the one in the photo seems to only have the original 4)

Are there any web sites that function as a sort of encyclopedia of obscure PC info? Or books?

Thank you in advance! I will probably figure it out, I am just trying to give a good home and use to this obviously high quality piece of network hardware


 -cdev

[james_s]

  ... it had printed over 524,000 pages before I got it.

The LaserJet series 4100 and similar models were designed and built for 50,000 pages per month. This goes back to the times of the end of the 90s I think it came on to the market in 97, when I bought my first one.

And still today, we can get parts for these old LaserJet's

If HP would have kept going on this quality level, they most likely would still be the king !
Sadly, many people in my circles complain about modern HP products.
So sad!

Unfortunately the problem is price. People would balk at the price tag of a modern printer that was built like one of the old Laserjets. They were expensive back then too, but you couldn't buy a $250 color laser printer at the time, all laser printers were expensive.

[rdl]

A place I once worked converted from mainframe+terminals to PCs around 1995-1996. The head office recommended printer was the HP Laserjet 4P and when our location went to buy the price was $999.

[BeBuLamar]

I think the OP is right! I liked HP products although I couldn't really afford many of them. I have a bunch of HP calculators from the 25, 41,48 etc... and they are great. I had an HP deskjet plus in the 1990 and it works fine until I moved in 2011 and throw it away. My first HP PC was the Vectra XU 6/200 with dual Pentium Pro. It was a great PC. The next one was the XW6000 dual Xeon but since it was a rebrand Compaq it's not all that great. I still use HP Z workstation but not as happy as when I was using the Vectra.

[GlennSprigg]

It has always left me 'Tongue-In-cheek' when people 'swear' by certain 'brands'...
When you look under the 'hood', there are a massive amount of suppliers for all the integral components, be there
various brands/styles of Memory-Boards, Hard-Drives, WiFi Hardware, CPU's/Gpu's etc etc.   The 'Mother-Board' seems
to be what it all gets down to...  It's like CARS!  The engines can come from many sources... The so-called 'options' can
vary astronomically including finer points like crash tests, and air-bag brands/efficiency...
The actual 'engineering' into the specific 'brand' as far as I'm concerned is making Flowers from dirt!!   

[rsjsouza]

  ... it had printed over 524,000 pages before I got it.

The LaserJet series 4100 and similar models were designed and built for 50,000 pages per month. This goes back to the times of the end of the 90s I think it came on to the market in 97, when I bought my first one.

The HP4000 (and the HP4 before them) series of printers are built like tanks and awesome printers. Years ago I got a 4100dtn with about 150000 pages but I had to sell it due to space - I wish I still had it.

[madires]

Products can change quite quickly when the management changes the company's direction. We've seen this over and over again. Meanwhile it's a challenge to find good, reliable and long lasting products.

[SilverSolder]

I have a couple of ~15 year old HP C5280 multifunction inkjet/scanners here, they work very well...  and even print on CDs, which is hard to find these days!

[Wuerstchenhund]

Sadly, this HP was once a good company. From the day Carly Fiorina took over, it has been downhill. If Mr Hewlett and Mr Packard were alive, they would be ashamed of what became of the once great company they founded. One thing that was good out of tonight's experience was an unfriendly reminder... NEVER, NEVER buy HP.

I think you're missing the big picture here:

First of all, HP's T&M division was a completely separate business unit from HP's computer business, all under separate management (and no, Carly Fiorina did not spin off HP's T&M division). Even within HP's computer business there are several separate business groups which all have their own management and performance targets. So just because the stuff produced by one division sucks doesn't necessarily mean everything else than comes out of that company sucks, too.

Most importantly, the majority of the people who complain about HP computers are consumers who bought (or helped someone who bought) one of HP's consumer line products, like the infamous Presario line. These products often suck because mostly they contain of cheap-ass parts that some assembler (who has a licensing agreement with HP for the HP brand) puts together to sell to brand-conscious consumers. And because it's normally either that assembler or another (cheap-ass) 3rd party service provider who performs warranty services and support for these products the overall experience is usually underwhelming.

However, as I already said because HP's consumer products are shit doesn't mean everything else is. HP's business products are nothing like the consumer crap that's sold under the HP brand, these systems are generally rock solid, durable and reliable. There is also nothing better in the workstation market than what HP offers. The same is true for servers (before they were spun off into HPE).

There's a saying in the IT industry: "Dell is business class, HP is enterprise grade". And that's for a reason. In many case, Dell is more than good enough, but they don't support their products as long as HP/HPE does. HP also did (and still does) a lot of stuff that Dell doesn't, such as HP Integrity under NonStop UNIX (which is used by many stock exchanges around the world) or it's HPC products.

So the headline should not be "Don't buy HP" but "Don't buy cheap consumer-grade shit no matter what name is on the label"

[BrokenYugo]

So the headline should not be "Don't buy HP" but "Don't buy cheap consumer-grade shit no matter what name is on the label"

I agree with this overall, though I must say the worst POS consumer laptop I ever encountered was a HP bought around 5 years ago. Wifi driver issues nearly from new and build quality problems in under a year. Naturally this purchase happened after I told the buyer to pick up an off lease Thinkpad T/X series or comparable Dell/HP for the same money.

[Wuerstchenhund]

I agree with this overall, though I must say the worst POS consumer laptop I ever encountered was a HP bought around 5 years ago. Wifi driver issues nearly from new and build quality problems in under a year. Naturally this purchase happened after I told the buyer to pick up an off lease Thinkpad T/X series or comparable Dell/HP for the same money.

I'm not surprised, I am still amazed on what crap HP puts its brand name on. But then this has been a well honored tradition by Compaq, which back in its days sold some of the worst ever consumer PCs there were (like with HP, Compaq's business kit was very good and solid). Why this has continued under HP, I don't know.

As as consumer, you're better off with Dell, which puts more efforts into its consumer products and provides a generally good service.

As far as Lenovo is concerned, I know many people praise Thinkpads but Lenovo (and IBM before them) has a long track record in designing in serious faults into many of them. Which is one reason we moved away from Thinkpads and use HP EliteBooks instead, which in our experience survive much better under abuse than Thinkpads.

[HighVoltage]

As far as Lenovo is concerned, I know many people praise Thinkpads but Lenovo (and IBM before them) has a long track record in designing in serious faults into many of them. Which is one reason we moved away from Thinkpads and use HP EliteBooks instead, which in our experience survive much better under abuse than Thinkpads.

I have heard this about Lenovo Thinkpads before as well. I have used only the professional "W" series Thinkpads and never had any problems at all. Maybe the EliteBooks are good but after so much bad experience with HP consumer products, I have not even trusted to buy an EliteBook.

... but I just bought an HP product:
The HP Calculator 11C what an amazing little calculator of the Hewlett-Packard Voyager series. 

Oh wait .... its from 1982.... the good old days!

[Wuerstchenhund]

As far as Lenovo is concerned, I know many people praise Thinkpads but Lenovo (and IBM before them) has a long track record in designing in serious faults into many of them. Which is one reason we moved away from Thinkpads and use HP EliteBooks instead, which in our experience survive much better under abuse than Thinkpads.

I have heard this about Lenovo Thinkpads before as well. I have used only the professional "W" series Thinkpads and never had any problems at all.

As we no longer use Thinkpads I don't know much about the durability of the newer generation but back then we had everything from X-Series (subcompact and tablets/convertibles), T-Series and Tp-Series (mobile workstations), and most of them had severe faults like cracked/stuck hinges, board flex, cracked base frames, display issues, and (especially with the Tp-Series) constant overheating under load.

Another thing I found remarkable was that none of the original Thinkpad batteries lasted more than 3 years (they all started to quickly degrade after 12-15 months, and after 30 months were pretty much down to minutes), while the batteries in our EliteBooks and zBooks easily lasted 3+ years without any notable degradation (the batteries in some of the older EliteBooks which by then were more than 5 years old still retained more than 80% of their design capacity).

Maybe the EliteBooks are good but after so much bad experience with HP consumer products, I have not even trusted to buy an EliteBook

I don't know, Lenovo's consumer grade laptops always had a similar shoddy reputation (and deservedly so), and on top of that there were incidents like hiding malware in the BIOS for automatic installation by Windows 

... but I just bought an HP product:
The HP Calculator 11C what an amazing little calculator of the Hewlett-Packard Voyager series. 

Oh wait .... its from 1982.... the good old days!

Indeed, even though HP still made them until the late '80s (and subsequently replaced by other models), and its counterpart for the financial market (12C) is still made 

[TimFox]

I do blame Carly for her neglect of the -hp- calculator line, one of the crowning achievements of American industry.
Luckily, Swiss Micros  https://www.swissmicros.com/  came through, updating the hardware and batteries while maintaining the functionality of the original.

[HighVoltage]

The swiss micro calculators are good (I have two of them) but they have not reached the hardware quality of a real HP 11C or 15C or similar. The buttons and case of the HP feel just so much better.

It is interesting indeed, that HP is still producing the 12C until now in the same quality.
I wish they would have continued the 11C 15C and 16C as well.

[AnasMalas]

Ill just chime in with another angle, politics

HP has supported some seriously bad stuff, there's a whole boycott thing going on

I wont say why or what they have done, most people here dont like politics, but its yet another reason to avoid them

[TimFox]

The swiss micro calculators are good (I have two of them) but they have not reached the hardware quality of a real HP 11C or 15C or similar. The buttons and case of the HP feel just so much better.

It is interesting indeed, that HP is still producing the 12C until now in the same quality.
I wish they would have continued the 11C 15C and 16C as well.

The 11C and 12C use the same hardware, but the 12C's firmware is for financial types, and may still be required when taking certain qualification examinations.
The buttons on my first Swiss Micro unit were disappointing mechanically, but those on my most recent purchase (DM41X) are good.  I also like the display of the full RPN stack.

[james_s]

I do blame Carly for her neglect of the -hp- calculator line, one of the crowning achievements of American industry.
Luckily, Swiss Micros  https://www.swissmicros.com/  came through, updating the hardware and batteries while maintaining the functionality of the original.

It's hard to blame them really, I don't think there is any money in calculators anymore outside of a small niche. I still have a few around the house but even so I rarely have one right in front of me and my phone is almost always in my pocket so 9 times out of 10 I pull that out and use the calculator app. For times when you need more than a basic calculator there are lots of calculator programs for computers. Many in the younger generations probably never used a real calculator unless a specific model was required for a class.

[Berni]

Yep over here HP is also not well received at all. Lots of other people here stay away from HP laptops and printers like it's the plague. I think they are mostly in the corporate market for workstations, servers..etc these days.

Indeed the HP test equipment division should have kept the HP name. But its hard to argue that in a business meting when the new computer stuff thing is making way more money than the test equipment (since computers are a much larger market to begin with). None the less Keysight still makes very good test gear and stands behind it by supporting it properly. It's still not exactly cheap but neither was HP gear back when it was brand new, quality comes at a cost.

[rsjsouza]

Yep over here HP is also not well received at all. Lots of other people here stay away from HP laptops and printers like it's the plague. I think they are mostly in the corporate market for workstations, servers..etc these days.

Indeed the HP test equipment division should have kept the HP name. But its hard to argue that in a business meting when the new computer stuff thing is making way more money than the test equipment (since computers are a much larger market to begin with). None the less Keysight still makes very good test gear and stands behind it by supporting it properly. It's still not exactly cheap but neither was HP gear back when it was brand new, quality comes at a cost.

Not only that, but the name had a very strong mindshare with the consumer market, where brand name is much more significant than B2B.

[TimNJ]

Just don't buy HP consumer stuff. It's garbage. Same for Dell, in my opinion.

Their business laptops are pretty solid though. My HP ProBook 6570b is going on 9 years now, no problems, and has held up very well. (Well, I should say I replaced the CPU, the memory, and swapped HDD for SSD)...but fundamentally solid.)

This is where I got it from (below). I recommend the business refurbished outlet to lots of people. Better quality product at good prices.

https://h41369.www4.hp.com/pps-offers.php

[Wuerstchenhund]

Yep over here HP is also not well received at all. Lots of other people here stay away from HP laptops and printers like it's the plague. I think they are mostly in the corporate market for workstations, servers..etc these days.

Indeed the HP test equipment division should have kept the HP name. But its hard to argue that in a business meting when the new computer stuff thing is making way more money than the test equipment (since computers are a much larger market to begin with). None the less Keysight still makes very good test gear and stands behind it by supporting it properly. It's still not exactly cheap but neither was HP gear back when it was brand new, quality comes at a cost.

Not only that, but the name had a very strong mindshare with the consumer market, where brand name is much more significant than B2B.

Actually, in B2B the brand name (and the reputation behind it) is *much* more important than for consumers, which pretty much always go for the lowest cost option.

[SilverSolder]

Yep over here HP is also not well received at all. Lots of other people here stay away from HP laptops and printers like it's the plague. I think they are mostly in the corporate market for workstations, servers..etc these days.

Indeed the HP test equipment division should have kept the HP name. But its hard to argue that in a business meting when the new computer stuff thing is making way more money than the test equipment (since computers are a much larger market to begin with). None the less Keysight still makes very good test gear and stands behind it by supporting it properly. It's still not exactly cheap but neither was HP gear back when it was brand new, quality comes at a cost.

Not only that, but the name had a very strong mindshare with the consumer market, where brand name is much more significant than B2B.

Actually, in B2B the brand name (and the reputation behind it) is *much* more important than for consumers, which pretty much always go for the lowest cost option.

"Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM"

[rsjsouza]

Actually, in B2B the brand name (and the reputation behind it) is *much* more important than for consumers, which pretty much always go for the lowest cost option.

That is not my experience at all. Too many examples to count in the consumer market (Motorola, Siemens, Philips, Dell, to name a few) while in the B2B side of things the various subsidiaries were changing hands and brand names all the time.

It is much easier to have a FAE/rep to consult and help with the transition for a X number of developers and managers than to change the mindshare of X¹⁰ people in the consumer market.

[SimonM]

Since they started to surprise owners of HP printers with firmware updates preventing the use of non-HP ink or toner cartridges I certainly stay away from HP printers.

Interesting - since there is more money in the ink than the printers e.g. it's an ink business that needs a printer.

I also have switched away from HP. I have a Brother printer which I haven't replaced in years - so I must be happy with it.

I have also switched away from buying manufacturer's ink (I was probably the last person on the planet to do that).

The printer didn't break, catch fire, etc. at least I didn't notice any change.

Ironically, I now have brand loyalty to the "knock-off" cartridge maker and won't buy anything else.

Simon

[kaz911]

My experiences:

HP Servers - used to be great - but my IBM servers last longer

HP Desktops - as cheaply made as Acer - with plenty of issues - and a lot of "custom" parts that are impossible to get spares for

HP Printers / MFC's - work ok - but software is incredibly bloated - who needs 1.3GB of printer software for and MFC. Switched to Brother MFC"s and have never looked back.

HP Wideformat - ohh well - used to be the bees knees - but my latest Z9+ have been a nightmare. Unfinished firmware - printer have had 3 times onsite warranty service - and again software is completely bloated and written IMHO by people who have never done a commercial print in their lives. Printer software killed the built in paper management service/database - making it impossible to create paper presets. And it was done just by importing a genuine HP Paper profile....

Lenovo Thinkpad - I have owned a lot - and used to be a big fan of Thinkpad for their ease of repair and service manuals available. But Lenovo can't design working high speed ports on them. So expect TB3/USB-C/USB 3.1 ports to fail at high speed transfers. (Thinkpad P1G1, P70, P51 and P52) On the P70 the built in ports did not work - but the Dock ports worked (USB 3.1 HS) - I went through a 3 month debugging tour with Lenovo service staff - and they gave up.  But none of the models mentioned are quite right for high speed transfers - they would crash when reading disks (large photo imports) - get annoyed when sync'ing phones - and not work at all with Saleae Logic Pro (Logic Pro would fail and try to lower capture speed again and again) - then I'd put the Logic Pro into any other PC and it just works. Even ran it of Parallels on a MBP and it works fine much to the surprise of Lenovo... Same issues across the ThinkPad models with my Tektronix RSA306 that does some pretty high speed USB transfers. My personal opinion is Lenovo is not great at making "matched pair" PCB traces.

So now I have switched to a CrapBook Pro with bootcamp for Windows if needed - and most things work really well. I know the insides are crap, but high speed transfers works direct on the CrapBook Pro - as long as I do not use terrible TB3 docking stations like CalDigit etc. But the CalDigit TS3+ still work better than ANY ThinkPad ThunderBolt dock (40AN) I have tried. 

[SilverSolder]

[...]
I have also switched away from buying manufacturer's ink (I was probably the last person on the planet to do that).
[...]

Well, yes and no.  I still buy manufacturer's ink for my HP inkjet, because the cartridges "just work", generally -  but I buy old stock cheap on eBay.  - I have had a lot of bad experience with "generic" ink cartridges.  In fairness, I haven't tried any for several years, maybe they've improved.

[HighVoltage]

Others have similar posts ... really sad to read after it really was one of the best companies in the world.

HP Sucks: Comments from Disgruntled HP Customers
https://www.gaebler.com/HP-Sucks-Comments-Page.htm

[madires]

Well, yes and no.  I still buy manufacturer's ink for my HP inkjet, because the cartridges "just work", generally -  but I buy old stock cheap on eBay.  - I have had a lot of bad experience with "generic" ink cartridges.  In fairness, I haven't tried any for several years, maybe they've improved.

Alternative ink and toner cartridges are a mixed bag. You can get everything from the cheapest junk to reasonable priced high quality cartridges from known brands. Sometimes the alternative ink/toner is ever better than the genuine one. If you print a lot and prefer an ink based printer choose one with large tanks which are easy refill with less expensive ink.

[SilverSolder]

Well, yes and no.  I still buy manufacturer's ink for my HP inkjet, because the cartridges "just work", generally -  but I buy old stock cheap on eBay.  - I have had a lot of bad experience with "generic" ink cartridges.  In fairness, I haven't tried any for several years, maybe they've improved.

Alternative ink and toner cartridges are a mixed bag. You can get everything from the cheapest junk to reasonable priced high quality cartridges from known brands. Sometimes the alternative ink/toner is ever better than the genuine one. If you print a lot and prefer an ink based printer choose one with large tanks which are easy refill with less expensive ink.

I'm keeping an older model alive, one that can print on CDs...   I have some older cars that only accept CDs, and it is kind of retro cool so I like to serve them what they like! 

[Raj]

Sure, they did kill their prebuilt computer division, but their shareholders must be pretty happy with how their printer division is making money.
In the end, company exists for shareholders and HP won cause I see their printers everywhere, and more than any other brand.

[AaronLee]

I have heard this about Lenovo Thinkpads before as well. I have used only the professional "W" series Thinkpads and never had any problems at all. Maybe the EliteBooks are good but after so much bad experience with HP consumer products, I have not even trusted to buy an EliteBook.

... but I just bought an HP product:
The HP Calculator 11C what an amazing little calculator of the Hewlett-Packard Voyager series. 

Oh wait .... its from 1982.... the good old days!

Yes, I had an HP16C in the same form factor as the 11C and totally loved that calculator. I used it to death and bought a spare out of fear the original would break down and I couldn't replace it, but it just kept on going. Before that I had an HP41C which was also great. And I had the original HP LaserJet from the mid 1980's. That thing was built like a tank, and weighed like one. It likely would have kept on going, but unfortunately my office got flooded which flooded out the HP, and with the insurance payoff I got an HP Laserjet IIP, which was better feature-wise, but already I felt the build quality was declining. Later on I bought an HP laptop, but was very disappointed and I've mostly avoided HP ever since.

I always associated the HP name with the original company and their well-built products, so it was sad to see them split off the test gear to the Agilent name, and then further on to Keysight. It would have been much better in my view for the HP name to have gone with the test equipment, and a new name for the computer gear.

[voltsandjolts]

A few of those HP calculators are still available new, in cloned form, using STM32 micros I believe.
https://www.swissmicros.com/products

[wraper]

The last straw for HP's came tonight. I wasted four hours of my life trying to install a HP P2055dn printer on someone's Windows 10 PC via USB. HP's drivers are dreadful. Their driver website says there are 3 drivers, but only 2 are listed.... can't they even get that right? Their driver software hangs. I finally got the printer driver to be detected, but for the life of me, it does not print a test page. Their moronic HP Doctor software does not work in saying everything is OK when it isn't. There is nothing wrong with the printer hardware other than the logo "HP". I could not be bothered spending a moment longer on this piece of HP crap. In the rubbish it goes - after I put a hammer though it.

Depending on updates that computer received it could be a windows bug from last year.
EDIT: there is also a new Windows printing bug. https://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-releases-cumulative-updates-to-fix-windows-10-print-error-issues/ Dunno if it affects the printer in question.
IMHO you unjustly lynched the printer without giving it a chance to defend in court.